Looking at Trees, published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2024, gathers contemporary photographs of trees, forests and woodlands under the editorial direction of Sophie Howarth. Its premise is both straightforward and quietly demanding: trees are part of the everyday landscape, yet habitual proximity can make them almost invisible. The book asks what changes when we pause long enough to look.

The collection brings together work by 24 photographers from different practices and perspectives, including Paul Hart, David Spero, Sue Bailey, Marc Alcock, Yoshinori Mizutani, Anna Beeke, Daniel Ballesteros, Myoung Ho Lee, Richard Mosse and Beth Moon, among others. Howarth is credited as the author, while the images belong to a broad photographic ensemble; that distinction matters. Rather than proposing a single signature style, the book sets different ways of seeing beside one another, allowing individual encounters with trees to remain distinct within a shared subject.

Its significance lies in the pressure it places on ordinary attention. The accompanying premise describes trees as ancient, life-sustaining plants and frames the book within a fast-changing world, where our relationship with nature warrants renewed consideration. This is not a botanical catalogue or a narrowly documentary survey. It is a contemporary photographic anthology that treats trees as subjects of form, atmosphere, memory and ecological thought, while retaining the open-endedness of photographic interpretation.

For collectors, Looking at Trees merits attention as a substantial collaborative survey of current image-making around a deceptively familiar motif. The 224-page English-language hardcover gives the project room to sustain multiple voices rather than reduce the theme to a single visual argument. Its value is therefore primarily artistic and editorial: a carefully defined subject becomes a meeting point for varied photographic approaches, inviting repeated looking at both the pictures and the living world they represent.